Abecedarian Break-Up Poem After Spending the Day Reading the Same 3 Children’s Books to Someone Else’s Baby

Always we’ve been Thursday. October. I’m giving up until spring,
breathing only out. The sky knows, the blue sky
cries it at me every evening and I learn how to swallow bugs like I am

dreaming green, I learn how to crawl
everywhere and still smile, blink, do the laundry, scatter it clean across my
floor. I’m seeing stars. Oh

god, I’m blacking out. I only have six favorite colors. I only
have none. I’ve never been seventeen, not once since
I stopped. You’re the color orange. I’m hollow like the sound a

jaguar makes. I forget the purple shape we used to be together, forget how to
know rhombus from rectangle, forget that rooftop bar and how I made us
label it our venue, how I wanted to see you want

me even though I knew I was already gone. Rings have
never fit any of my ten fingers, count with me, watch me take off the
one my parents gave me. I am glad to unlearn you, un-

promise you. It’s too late, close your eyes, be
quiet. Even the animals say good night to the moon. Do you hear the train? Do you
remember the second time? Don’t. Maybe now, a body and an answer can be the

same thing. My head on the square of your chest can absolve my need
to respond. On the phone I tell my mom I doused all the white mold in bleach
until it burnt out. She says this is good but everything smells

violent now. Do you see the yellow bumblebee? I pour honey on my tongue, it’s the
wrong bees, wrong flowers, wrong
xylems. I am most beautiful when I am all alone. I am most alone

yesterday. I can’t go back to give myself company, can’t be an over-
zealous lover, the one who stays, keeps turning the pages back to avoid the end.

Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University and has a bachelor’s degree in English from Salisbury University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her poems can be found in Sugar House Review, North American Review, Roanoke Review, Cider Press Review and elsewhere.